Meetings 27 Sep 2023 · 5 min read Overscheduled and Overwhelmed: My Battle Against Meeting-Mania Meetings, meetings, meetings. As a CTO, my calendar gets jam-packed with what feels like back-to-back meetings from dawn to dusk if I’m not vigilant. Don’t get me wrong Read more
Project Management 26 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Why Your Roadmap is Worthless Without Rigor As CTO, I’m constantly seeking ways to improve how we build and deliver software. After a few painful release rollouts riddled with delays, defects, and cost overruns, someone suggested Read more
Teamwork 25 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Managing Opinions and Egos on Product Teams Being a UX designer is one of the most challenging jobs ever. You spend years honing your craft, building your design sense, and working on countless projects. Then, someone with Read more
Technical debt 24 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Software Rot: When Systems Become Legacy Recently, I became a user of Revolut, an 8-year-old digital banking and financial services company. Initially offering just money transfer and exchange services in the UK, Revolut now provides various Read more
AI 23 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Forget Dashboards, Let Users Chat with Data Chatbots may seem like just another tech buzzword, but they actually have the power to transform how businesses work with data in a big way. Instead of companies investing months Read more
AI 22 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Engineering Realities of AI Chatbot Development Chatbots are everywhere these days. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year, companies like ours have been exploring leveraging this exciting new technology. Our goal is to help businesses Read more
Requirements management 21 Sep 2023 · 3 min read Requirements Are Made to Be Broken I was talking to a fellow software developer recently, and he was complaining about how imperfect the development process is. His main point of complaint was that he’s constantly Read more
Project Management 20 Sep 2023 · 5 min read The Quest for the Holy Grail of Project Management Systems It could be me, but none of the off-the-shelf project management tools work for us. They’re either overly complicated like Jira or too simplistic and lack the functionality and Read more
No-Code 19 Sep 2023 · 5 min read Xano: Can You Really Build Real APIs With No Code? Today, I tried Xano, a backend-as-a-service platform enabling users to build apps without writing code. With it, you can create a REST API powered by a fully-fledged database and connect Read more
Remote Work 18 Sep 2023 · 3 min read Is Remote Work Here to Stay? I was recently interviewing a software developer, let’s call him John. John was struggling to balance his work and personal life. He had to move to another city because Read more
CTO 17 Sep 2023 · 4 min read CTO Skills: Much More Than Just Being a Great Engineer Today, I’ve stumbled upon a 2017 interview with Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and CTO of Airbnb. In it, Blecharczyk discusses his background as an entrepreneur and how he became involved Read more
Off-The-Shelf 16 Sep 2023 · 4 min read When Off-the-shelf Products You Depend on Shift Gears and Target Enterprise Airtable, a code-free software company once valued at $11.7 billion, has announced layoffs of 27% of its workforce, or 237 people. This is part of a plan to refocus Read more
Creativity 15 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Art Behind the Apps: Why Software is a Creative Act Building software products is a creative process, much like painting, writing, or any other art form. This became clear when I recorded an extremely short screencast demonstrating a product our Read more
Prioritization 14 Sep 2023 · 5 min read The Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand of Project Management I have a friend. Every message she writes begins with “URGENT! IMPORTANT!”. I’m not kidding. She does that because she learned that if she doesn’t add those words Read more
UI 13 Sep 2023 · 6 min read Why We Ditched Material UI for the Long Haul The house I rent right now near Ericeira, Portugal, has terrible plumbing for heating. Very few people care about heating in Portugal because winter here lasts only a few months, Read more
CTO 12 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Why Product Development Turns Into Herding Cats As Tech Teams Grow Have you ever noticed how things can look so perfect from a distance but less ideal upon closer inspection? It’s like planning a vacation and choosing a hotel based Read more
Remote Work 11 Sep 2023 · 5 min read Overemployment: Genius Hack or Unethical Practice? Santiago Valdarrama shared a story on Twitter yesterdat about an employee he had to let go. The employee was secretly working two full-time jobs at the same time. Santiago had Read more
Privacy 10 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Auto Industry is Sacrificing Your Privacy And Why You Should Care A few days ago, the Mozilla Foundation released the results of its research about data privacy in modern cars that they’ve conducted for their “Privacy Not Included” guide. The Read more
Meetings
